The Data Ethics Canvas is a guide/workshop resource with a series of 15 steps, each with questions to consider and answer that stimulate debate about how data and data subjects will be treated during a data project. Peter Wells, head of policy at the Open Data Institute, answers a few questions on what the Data Ethics Canvas is, who can use it, why, and where the idea for it came from.
Toni Sekinah: What is the data ethics canvas?
Peter Wells: It’s a practical advocacy tool able to help organisations and projects teams understand ethical decisions they might have to make and help them make those decisions.
TS: Who is using the Data Ethics Canvas?
PW: We are aware of multinational organisations using it, both businesses and NGOs. The Gates Foundation ispublicly using it in a lot of its work around the world. The national businesses are using in the UK. For example the Co-Operative Group is using it in itsdigital services. They’ve built it into all of their life cycles. And then local organisations like Waltham Forest council, they’ve built it into their service delivery models to help them understand and assess ethical issues.
TS: Why should they use it?
PW: They should use it because in the world of technology, there are many people who have built bad things, either accidentally or deliberately. Those bad things can harm people or our democracies. It can also harm the businesses, it harms their bottom lines. They want to actively reduce the harm they could cause and using tools like the Data Ethics Canvas early in their processes reduces their chance of getting things wrong.
TS: What has the reception to the Data Ethics Canvas been like?
PW: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how big the take up has been. The way it keeps popping up in our social media feeds from all sorts of places is great. Surprisingly, we’ve seen businesses building the Data Ethics Canvas into their own professional services; people are selling workshops that use the Data Ethics Canvas. So they are using it as a tool to help other businesses, and that’s really nice to see because it has a huge impact.
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